MSFS20 FSX style BGL Touch n Go Schedules for MSFS

[=Hollywood=]

It has been well over 15 years since I was involved with ProjectAI and the beta for Ultimate Traffic and Ultimate Traffic X and with the demise of ProjectAI.

I've been searching for days on how to compile and format AI flightplan's from the FSX SDK. I've looked at AIFP and it's way more complicated than what I need and TrafficTools before that...

Years ago I had made up a flight plan for each aircraft in the pattern of:

Monday - YBAF 8am-9am circuits (TNG), 10am-11am circuits (TNG), 12pm-1pm circuits (TNG), 2pm-3pm circuits (TNG), 4pm-5pm circuits (TNG)
Tuesday - YBAF 8am-9am circuits (TNG), 10am-11am circuits (TNG), 12pm-1pm circuits (TNG), 2pm-3pm circuits (TNG), 4pm-5pm circuits (TNG)
Wednesday - YBAF 8am-9am circuits (TNG), 10am-11am circuits (TNG), 12pm-1pm circuits (TNG), 2pm-3pm circuits (TNG), 4pm-5pm circuits (TNG)
Thursday - YBAF 8am-9am circuits (TNG), 10am-11am circuits (TNG), 12pm-1pm circuits (TNG), 2pm-3pm circuits (TNG), 4pm-5pm circuits (TNG)
Friday - YBAF 8am-9am circuits (TNG), 10am-11am circuits (TNG), 12pm-1pm circuits (TNG), 2pm-3pm circuits (TNG), 4pm-5pm circuits (TNG)
Sat - YBAF 8am-9am fly to YAMB, YAMB 10am-11am circuits (TNG), 12pm-1pm circuits (TNG), 2pm-3pm circuits (TNG), 4pm-5pm circuits (TNG)
Sunday - YAMB 8am-9am circuits (TNG), 10am-11am circuits (TNG), 12pm-1pm circuits (TNG), 2pm-3pm circuits (TNG), 4pm-5pm fly to YBAF

Repeat every week.

Now I've looked at the fs10.AircraftTypes.csv and generated:

# typeKey,Title,Cruise,minAlt,maxAlt,minRange,maxRange,minRwyLen,runwayTypes,radius,parkingTypes,IFR%,AutoRoute?,TouchAndGo
PA38-0,Piper PA-38-112 Tomahawk VH-FTI 1990 AirTC 16K,110,10,130,5,539,550,HARD|SOFT|SNOW,11,RAMP,5,yes,yes

I'm forgetting how to format the schedule though and the annoying thing is that AIFP makes you choose a second airport pair rather than letting you do straight circuits at the same airfield... Which, from memory is why I had to hand code the flight plan.

Now I can't recall if I had to put the entire sequence for the week into one major flightplan or separate them by day, I think it had to be all in one.

Anyone with long term memory able to help or have any info on AIG's new GA tool which seems like it would be powerful but I can't find any documentation on it regarding inputting GA schedules for home airports etc.

 

[=rk=]

AIFP makes you choose a second airport pair rather than letting you do straight circuits at the same airfield... Which, from memory is why I had to hand code the flight plan.

AIFP is not preventing single leg flight plans, they are not supported. Even if you want to do TnG you still have to define a destination that is different from the origin.

Now I can't recall if I had to put the entire sequence for the week into one major flightplan or separate them by day, I think it had to be all in one.

We can create one flight plan that includes a minimum of a destination and a return leg and that plan will be active every occasion the date/time interval was set to. For example, it you set it to four hour legs and the distances support that schedule the sim will run that plan perpetually. If you set that destination and return for a specific day of the month, it will run that FP once a month. We are also allowed to stack multiple plans into a schedule.

 

[=Hollywood=]

AIFP is not preventing single leg flight plans, they are not supported. Even if you want to do TnG you still have to define a destination that is different from the origin.

We can create one flight plan that includes a minimum of a destination and a return leg and that plan will be active every occasion the date/time interval was set to. For example, it you set it to four hour legs and the distances support that schedule the sim will run that plan perpetually. If you set that destination and return for a specific day of the month, it will run that FP once a month. We are also allowed to stack multiple plans into a schedule.

AIFP literally came up with a message saying choose a different destination airport. =rk= please refrain from commenting on my posts, your information is always incorrect and completely different to what I am asking.

I had it working over 15 years ago but deleted my source files looooong ago. So your comments have no bearing on my question.

Okay had to go back to FS2004 SDK:

# Aircraft type: C182-0
# Tail number: G-ASDF
# Traffic density: 33%
# Repeats every: week
# Flight rules: VFR
# Schedule:
# Day Time Departure Destination Altitude FlightNumber Circuits?
# Sat 1901Z KEUG KSLE 65 (none) until Sat 2000Z
# Sat 2000Z KSLE KEUG 55 none
C182-0,G-ASDF,33,ONE_WEEK,VFR
{
61901,KSLE,65,,62000
62000,KEUG,55
}

# Aircraft type: C172-1
# Tail number: N172SP
# Traffic density: 33%
# Repeats every: hour
# Flight rules: VFR
# Schedule:
# Time Departure Destination Altitude FlightNumber Circuits?
# 0010Z KEUG KEUG 12 (none) until 0045Z
C172-1,N172SP,33,ONE_HOUR,VFR
{
0010,KEUG,12,,0045
}

 

[=rk=]

The information shared on this site is a resource for all developers, regardless how important they perceive themselves to be and the fact that MSFS does not support single leg flight plans is no reason to be rude.

 

[=rk=]

I'm not going to keep going back and forth with attitudes, this is a forum for discussing development. If you want to control who comments your posts, you could try starting your own forum. I know for a fact that MSFS requires a return to origin leg for compiled flight plans, because I have created and published airports with dedicated AI traffic, They are available from the site linked in my sig for anyone that wants to explore. I'm not simply refuting developers based on foggy memories from FS9.

People reading along and trying to learn about AI traffic from this have been shown they should probably explore adding a return leg if their AI flight plans don't work. Beyond that, they would probably do best by double and triple verifying anything reported on this thread!

 

[=Hollywood=]

Note: for those reading this thread, I've been using FS since Sublogic 1.0, was on FSX Beta team, ProjectAI member, Ultimate Traffic 2004 and Ultimate Traffic X beta tester, FS11 Design Advisory Board Member, on a team investigating building a new sim with a major FS developer, on the FSNextGen Team, was contracted with Dovetail Games for Flight Simulator Flight School and Flight Simulator World and a lot of my game design docs from DTG have been implemented into MSFS 2020 and some is being added in MSFS 2024. Despite a certain entity making certain claims, I am very well aware of FS internals right from the beginning of the sim and I do not make unsubstantiated claims nor provide false information. So I'm moving on with the reality of FSX based AI flight plans in MSFS 2020 and others are welcome to join me in the journey as we have lost a lot since the demise of Project AI days.

Yes FSX/MSFS AI flight plans do support a flight plan that is circuits at one airport only and does not need a second airport and this has been the case since FS2004 and I believe FS2002.

Okay I've sorted out the FSX circuits style offline AI flight plans and got them working. I had to go back to the FSX Acceleration SDK's to do it old style.

What's interesting is it won't allow for more than 3 aircraft doing circuits in at one airport at the same time, this limit is hard coded in FSX and make sense as in real life you really wouldn't have more than 3 aircraft doing circuits at once.

It comes back with a compile error of "error: Unable to find a slot for touch and goes at YAMB for Piper PA-38-112..." once the first 3 are scheduled. Not sure why it won't compile for YBAF and says can't find a slot for touch and go's.

I know I'm going back to old technology but all the AI tools since TTools, while extremely powerful, have been a bear and quite complicated to use from scratch with MSFS. Also they've mostly been built to handle airline schedules rather than GA doing flying training circuits etc. I am getting up to speed with it rapidly but had issues trying to add MSFS custom repaints without model folders etc so am having to find a workflow to achieve what I need.

I do need to get up to speed with the MSFS SDK's and the way they handle traffic.

What I've ended up doing is bringing the successfully compiled FSX YAMB circuits into AIFP then manually adding the other aircraft and now testing in sim to see if it can handle the 6 aircraft, I'm sure there will be many go arounds.

Once I have nutted out the whole process the way I want it to work I'll generate a side companion app that will make generating the flight plans and traffic way more simple for me.

Currently I have all 6 aircraft doing circuits for an hour departing every 2nd hour. Once I have the weekly schedule figured out I'll be able to have them fly out of YBAF for circuits Mon-Fri, fly out to YAMB on Saturday Mornings, do circuits at YAMB then fly back to YBAF sunday afternoons.

 

[=Hollywood=]

TODAY'S INVESTIGATIONS:

So I seem to have tracked down some bugs that have to do with the scheduling for AI Offline Traffic. I was working on the airport and noticed either the aircraft were frozen or they would work. I've had 6 aircraft all doing TNG's at once. Then as I worked and tested the aircraft seemed like they were frozen. I kept adjusting the sim time but nothing worked on schedule...

Then I came across this thread at Offline AI Traffic - Windows system time used to spawn AI Traffic - no effect changing sim time/date and have been able to confirm this is still an issue with the sim using system time instead of sim time to control the AI offline traffic schedules. It was fixed previously but got borked again with another sim update.

I manually changed the clock to my system time and was able to reproduce the issue. So now I know how to test the scheduling until they fix it. I guess I'm stuck flying with real time and FSLTL live traffic as well. At first I thought it was a hard coded limit on the number of aircraft doing TNG's but nope it's a system clock issue bug. I now have 10 aircraft attempting to do circuits at YAMB.

 

[=Hollywood=]

DAY 3 UPDATE:

It indeed does seem the bug with scheduling is tied in to live system time. Today's date where I am is Sat Jul 13, I had to change the computer's system time to Wed July 17 to get the right day's AI schedule. I need to investigate further what the time offset is however.

I am thinking that until Asobo fixes the AI Offline time issues I may just set my touch 'n go's to run both day and night. Outside of that I did end up getting distracted by finding an old FS2004/FSX AI flight plan for Ansett Airlines' final schedule before they went bankrupt and was able to convert it with AIFP and hook up FSLTL blank equivalent aircraft to represent Ansett in sim. This is the airline I literally grew up on.

I do have some other ideas once I get my old dream projects from 20 years ago done.

 

[=Hollywood=]

Early test of touch 'n' Go's at YAMB. Been doing more work lately and looking at getting up to speed with ai.cfg and flaring on landing.

Getting weirdness with the taxi line as well in a few things as the Tomahawks wander off centerline. Again trying to work with the ai.cfg to fix that issue.